Good video site

I’m looking at setting up a pornohop group and found http://www.milkandcookies.com while looking for an MP3 of that classic, I wanna fuck you in the ass. Unfortunately the link doesn’t work. I originally had the song on a compilation of filthy hiphop given to me by some grubby French person, which may have been purged…

Truffle kerfuffle

From Ibn ‘AbdÅ«n’s rulebook for Seville market, translated by Bernard Lewis: “Truffles should not be sold around the mosque, for this is a delicacy of the dissolute.” (Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed Olivia R Constable) There’s no reason to believe this ties in with the prohibition on the use of…

Spanish translation out-sourcing

I’ve long shared Mr Davies’ view that translation budgets here are viewed principally as a means of financing feckless relatives and acquaintances.

The personal and the political

Colin Davies suggests that people shouldn’t be allowed to discuss political independence until they have achieved domestic independence by moving out of their parents’ home. Since most street terrorist live off and with their mums (as do most people under 30), this seems quite sensible to me, although I’m not sure how easy it would…

Back-to-front and upside-down

It’s not just texts in furrin languages that I sing without hearing the meaning. For some reason, from when we learnt it as kids as a function of some education director’s dawning multicultural flushblush to now, I’ve always sung “My heart is down,/my head is turning around,/I had to leave a little girl in Kingston…

Pan-European tax system already with us?

I’ve always billed using my national fiscal number, but now I’ve got some loon telling me that I can’t do that anymore cross-border and that I need a European fiscal number. It would be nice if someone had told us. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing we’ll get to vote on anyway.

Victorian style guide

Walton Burgess’ Five Hundred Mistake [sic] of Daily Occurrence in Speaking Pronouncing and Writing the English Language (1873) sounds interesting ;-)